


Be Unbroken

by especiallythezefronposter



Series: Pieces [3]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bruce is Black Widow, Character Study, M/M, Tony is Hawkeye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 22:36:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7125676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/especiallythezefronposter/pseuds/especiallythezefronposter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now, Bruce likes to pretend Tony is the first memory he has, that before him there was only silence, only a peaceful childhood he cannot even imagine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be Unbroken

**Author's Note:**

> Here's how I switched up the characters:  
> Bruce Banner: Black Widow  
> Tony Stark: Hawkeye  
> Pepper Potts: Phil Coulson  
> Natasha Romanoff: Iron Man  
> Thor: Captain America  
> Maria Hill: Pepper Potts  
> Steve Rogers: Hulk  
> Clint Barton: God of Thunder

Bruce learns and unlearns, learns and unlearns. Now, he likes to pretend Tony is the first memory he has, that before him there was only silence, only a peaceful childhood Bruce cannot even imagine. Happy children sounds to him like an oxymoron. He says this to Tony and he only nods.

Bruce learns to be ruthless, unlearns to be afraid. Learns to kill, unlearns to trust. Learns that everything he ever did was wrong, unlearns to go back to the Red Room, to count his life in missions. Learns that he is safe, unlearns to be ruthless. Learns to trust, unlearns to love Tony more than he should. These are things not easily changed, and there are other things he never unlearns. The nightmares, the knife in his shoe, the gun always near. It takes seven months before he takes the cyanide pill out of a fake molar in the back of his mouth and gives it to Tony. To this day it still feels strange to sleep in a bed without cuffing himself to the headboard.

The night he takes out the cyanide pill, he hears Tony crying in his room, because that's another thing Bruce has learnt, to watch over those he loves as a new form of self-preservation.

-

Tony is so patient it makes Bruce feel sick sometimes. They live in a cabin Tony's borrowing from a friend, no one else around. Bruce hates it, hates that Tony trusts him not to kill him even though he's tried before. It's so easy here, with the cold forest around them, to make it look like an accident, to use all the little tricks he's never unlearnt.

He repeats this to Tony whenever he gets bad, that he'll always be a monster before he's anything else. This time they're eating breakfast: pancakes and milk, right from the carton. Tony looks at him the way he always does, stubborn and sure, but his swollen eye emphasises his misguided trust.

Bruce locks himself in his room for the rest of the day, and listens to Tony's feet as they move around the cabin. He doesn't sing in himself as he usually does, doesn't turn on the TV or come to talk to Bruce and it's all Bruce's fault. By midnight his guilt gets the better of him and he carefully leaves his room. Tony's door is ajar, meaning Bruce is welcome.

He's quiet when he gets in, but he can tell Tony is awake. Neither of them sleeps for most of the night, but they lie in the same bed, comforted by each other's warmth, and it's more peace than Bruce is used to.

-

After ten months Tony declares Bruce safe for society. It takes another year before Bruce agrees.

-

They move out of the cabin, both into different SHIELD-assigned apartments. They go on missions together and sometimes Tony drinks orange juice from Bruce's carton on Bruce's kitchen counter, but it's not the same.

At night Bruce reads Tony's file, gets to know him as best as he can, all the mistakes he made, all the places he's lived in, all the women he's fallen in love with, and tries to learn something new - to accept this, that Tony will never love him back.

-

He's already read the files when Tony tells him about them. The Avengers Initiative. Bruce is leaving to asses Natasha Romanoff in three days, to see whether she's cut out to be a _superhero_.

He already knows what he's going to say in the end: that she isn't the right person, that none of them are. He can tell how much Tony hates the whole idea from the way he looks at the file, at the suit Bruce is having fitted to blend in in Romanoff's world, and that's all Bruce needs to decide how he feels about it himself.

-

He considers sleeping with Romanoff when she says, without any hesitation, that she would if he agreed. Just to feel a little less bad about loving Tony, to feel like at least he's trying to move on. Instead he flirts with her assistant, Maria Hill, who smiles at him indulgently, but understands, is just as dumbly in love with Natasha as he is with Tony.

-

Once Tony kisses him on a mission and Bruce hates how he thinks of it for weeks after, how he goes to a bar as soon as they get home and kisses the first stranger that wants to kiss him back, just to be rid of the taste.

-

He's on a mission when Tony gets taken by the alien, and he hates that he's relieved along with angry and worried. That he's grateful that they had a fight before the mission, because to make up Tony slept in his bed the night before he left, and at least Bruce still has the memory of his warmth.

-

He fights his way through it. He feels like he did before he met Tony, cold and quiet and practical. There's nothing in his head except for the meticulously ordered specifics of his current mission - to stop the alien, to save Tony or take him down. It's comfortable, like the sweater Tony left at his apartment, the one Bruce still wears sometimes.

He lies and lies and lies ('love is for children,' he says, but the alien sees right through it) and he hates that he has to, that he has to be the person Tony tried to take out of him. 

At night he sits with Pepper Potts in the empty cafeteria on the Helicarrier and tells her that they're going to get Tony back. She smiles at him as if he is being naive.

-

When she dies he hates her. Hates that he will have to tell Tony, hates that Tony will only love her more.

-

Tony isn't the same, after. His hands shake in the morning, and he can only sleep with the TV turned on. Bruce discovers that he calls the same number every night in the bathroom, and he knows it must be Pepper's, that he listens to her voicemail before he goes to bed.

He asks Bruce to move in, and there's only one bed so they share it, and there's plenty of blankets but they share one of those, too. Sometimes Tony kisses him, not like he loves him but like he's looking for something. Someone.

Bruce decides he will live with this, with the best he can get.

-

He knows that Pepper is still alive before Tony does. He feels justified in not telling him right away. He should check first, shouldn't risk breaking Tony all over again because of wrong information.

-

He isn't there when Tony and Pepper see each other again for the first time since her supposed death. He is packing his bags.

-

Tony sounds wounded when Bruce finally picks up the phone. By then he's already made a new passport and crossed continents without leaving a paper trail. He ignores Tony's questions until Tony gets uncomfortable with the quiet and starts talking himself. He tells Bruce that Pepper has made a team of specialists, that they're going to travel the world, that he's joining them. The only thing Bruce says is, 'Call when you can.'

-

He goes to Washington D.C.. Captain America is there, crying like a child at night and smiling as genuinely as he can by day. Bruce pities him, but he wishes he didn't.

-

Once he considers loving him, considers pretending until it becomes true, knowing that Thor would be willing to do the same for him. When they kiss in the mall it's a test, to see if he can convince himself to forget about Tony and move on.

He decides that when Tony calls him next, he'll tell him that Captain America's lips taste of apple pie, but in truth they are warm and salty like tears.

-

Thor wants him to tell Tony he loves him. Bruce wants to believe it would make a difference.

-

Their first mission together since the Battle ends with them on a plane to New York. Neither of them proposes to go to Romanoff Tower, but that's where they end up.

'I've made rooms for everyone,' Natasha says as she pours them drinks.

Bruce nods, but for a moment Tony does not react. Then he says, 'I'd rather share,' he turns to Bruce, 'if you want that, of course.'

-

Sometimes Tony kisses him, like he loves him, like he's got everything he's looking for right here. Bruce knows that Tony wants to kiss Pepper like this, too, but that he doesn't, not anymore.

-

Bruce unlearns to doubt, unlearns to hide everything he wants to say behind a neutral face and a closed mouth. He cannot unlearn the anger, but he learns to live with it, to spread it out through his body instead of allowing it to build up behind his sternum.

Tony is not the first memory he has, but he is the happiest: smiling, quiet, at dinner with this unexpected group of friends that he trusts, that he wants to protect. His first memory not of peace, but of something safe, something clean, something that he touches without any coming away on his fingers.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song Will the Circle be Unbroken from the movie the Broken Circle Breakdown.


End file.
